Old 120GB Deathstar has been wiped

I don't get what happened here. One of my old 120GB IDE drives, a Hitachi Deskstar has worked flawlessly for years connected to IDE inside my case. I removed it from my case recently and installed it in a new SATA/IDE enclosure today and connected via USB. I decided to check all my drives health in crystal disk and it showed a caution for the Deskstar with 'Reallocated sectors count 1'. I double clicked the drive and saw my folders in it but it wouldn't let me open most of them and saying data is corrupted. There was about 80GB of stuff mostly in the old program files folder which I can't access, and hovering over the folder it says it's empty. In my computer it used to say total size 115GB, free size 34.9GB.
It didn't show in safely remove hardware either. I rebooted the PC, and then a message in taskbar saying installing new device software, successful (for the deskstar). But this time nothing showing in my computer. And then in disk manager it wants me initialize the disk! I didn't initialize it, I cancelled out. And, it says unallocated 99.4 GB. Firstly, I don't know what caused it to make out it's a new drive that needs initializing and secondly, why it's saying 99.4GB instead of 115GB. I don't know if there was anything particularly important I needed but I assume it's been wiped? is there a way to retrieve or see what was on there, like maybe that program Recuva? Would it make any difference connecting it via IDE on my motherboard to see if anything changes or have I lost the data?

Thanks mate, good to know my stuff might still be there. There's a strong chance that there's nothing majorly important on the drive, but if I could just at least see what's on there first, that would help me decide if I can go ahead and just blitz the drive with killdisk or something. First thing I'll try is installing the drive directly back to my IDE socket on my motherboard to see if anything changes, but probably not. As you say, something that holds info about the data (MBR perhaps?) is corrupted. I might try Recuva. It's meant to be amazing and it's free I think.

Wow! I went and found my IDE cable, took the Deathstar out of the USB box, and installed it back to my motherboard. Upon booting I get a DOS type screen saying about problems on drive F: and how it needs to perform a chkdsk. I had a few seconds to decide or opt out but I let it go into the checking. Millions upon millions of entries scrolled as in this screenshot and I was like ..



But then, there was light at the end of the tunnel. After a few minutes I noticed scores of scrolling entries saying 'recovering'. Then it booted into windows and lo and behold, I can access all my stuff!

Before this happened, total size was 115GB, free space 34.9GB. Now it says 115 GB, 47.2GB. So I guess it must have deleted 12GB of files that were corrupted. Well, whatever that 12GB of stuff was, it's gone now, so there's nothing I can do and it probably wasn't very important. The only thing of importance still on the drive is my fraps folder which contains 67GB of screenshots and game movies, so I'm glad I have those back. I'm currently transferring that stuff to my other drive. Crystal Disk still shows the same caution, so I'll blitz the drive with killdisk and see if it clears the reallocated sectors caution, unless anyone can suggest a better thing to do to this drive other than drive a lorry over it?

I've got another IDE drive, an old WD Caviar Blue 320GB. I'll install that to the motherboard this time and transfer everything, just in case it's the USB enclosure that's corrupting these drives, or perhaps it's just a general IDE to USB incompatibility. Or perhaps it's just the Deathstar living up to it's reputation. Though it has been good to me over the years to be fair. I noticed clicking for a few seconds each time the drive was booted and a whirring noise when accessing files, so it's probably as good as dead.
Edited by Roman5 - 11/10/12 at 7:06am